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Booting to Dos to perform Virus scan

I have a number of NT4 workstations infected with a virus. To clean them I need to boot to MSDOS to run the AV software. None of the machines have MSDOS loaded. I have ERD Commander but it cannot run the application at command line. How can I get these machines to boot up with MSDOS without loading MSDOS on each machine. There must be a boot floppy isn't there??

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Booting to Dos to perform Virus scan

Your AV software should be able to generate a boot disk for you for just this kind of emergency. If not then make one using the "sys" Dos command.

get a dos prompt on a NT machine. Type sys a: (make sure floppy is in drive)Your are thendone. If you can adjust the config.sys and autoexec.bat files as well if you need anything other then the c: drive to come active. You can even add the AV software command to the Autoexec file and it will start automatically upon boot.

Boot using this disk and you should be set to go.

You only need a boot disk, not the whole Dos program. As long as you can see the c: drive you should be ok. However, with Dos not being compatible with some hard drive configurations, you could have trbl viewing any further partitions though this is rare.

Booting to Dos to perform Virus scan

If NTFS, then "pure" DOS will not be able to recognize the partition (you will need to use something like DOSNTFS for that.You could create an NT boot disk (Emergency repair disk) and run an emulated DOS session that way (remember, NT's command prompt only emulates DOS 5).But to be honest, what are you doing using an AV package on NT that has to use DOS to repair? NT is NOT a windows GUI on top of DOS, like the Win3x/Win9x range, it's a different OS altogether. Would you use a DOS AV package on a Mac?

Booting to Dos to perform Virus scan

NO, NO, NO! You cant boot of of an emergency repair disk, it only has compressed registry hives on it, and you can't "SYS A:" unless you have MSDOS 5.0 on the NT machine, and if that was the case, then no reason to post. You can get DR-DOS 7.03 fromLineo @ ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos/DR-DOS.703/images/You just need the image of disk one, but remember, if its an NTFS drive, all you'll be able to do is "fdisk /mbr" to clean the master boot record, which doesn't need AV software to do. I sureif Your AV software was meant for NT, it wouldn't instruct you to "boot to MSDOS"! Sorry, but thats the truth. By the way, are you implying that your AV software found a virus, but won't remove it?

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